Writing a Resume for an internship at a large local CMS company. How does this preamble sound? How can I make it better/follow it up?

My name is Korvin Szanto, I'm an 18 year old programmer from Portland
Oregon. Ever since age 10, I've had a fascination with literal
interpretation of problems, which has been subsided through problem
solving in various programming languages. Growing up, I often engaged
in what is now called "Code Golf", a game in which you attempt to
provide the shortest (bitwise) solution to the a given problem, such
as the famous FizzBuzz problem. Given this experience, I am now
proficient in several programming languages including all standard web
languages as well as Perl and (Recently) Python.

Whenever I write, I find that my sentences are riddled with commas making them short winded and uninteresting, How can I improve this?

New Version

Preamble:

My name is Korvin Szanto, I'm an 18 year old programmer from Portland
Oregon. Ever since age 10, I've had a fascination with literal
interpretation of problems, which has been fullfilled through problem
solving in various programming languages. Growing up, I often engaged
in what is now called "Code Golf", a game in which you attempt to
provide the shortest, or fastest, solution to the a given problem,
akin to the famous FizzBuzz problem. Given this experience, I am now
proficient in several programming languages including all standard web
languages as well as Perl and, recently, Python. I recently graduated
from Rex Putnam High School and obtained a job as lead backend
developer for a local medium sized online advertisement agency. My
daily tasks involve modifying open source CMS's/CRM's such as
Wordpress, Joomla, SugarCRM, and starting yesterday, Concrete5, aswell
as upholding the integrity of the office beit a virus or a popup, I'm
the person they call.

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1

I do not know why you use prose text, instead of a list or a table, but probably you have a good reason to do it. I don't think you understood what kindall tried to tell you. FizzBuzz is not a challenge, it's a joke. If you can't solve FizzBuzz, you do not even have the minimum qualification for a programmer. Do you think a carpenter puts in his resume, that he knows, that the pointed end of a nail goes first into the wall? Besides that: you do a lot of things "recently"; just skip that word. And there are no apostrophes before a plural-s. Abbreviations are no exception to this rule.
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John SmithersOct 27 '11 at 8:35

I left the fizzbuzz in, yet I changed the wording to akin the the famous FizzBuzz problem because as it is simple, it's still synonymous with coding challenges and often shows up in codegolf problems.
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Korvin SzantoOct 27 '11 at 14:33

I think you meant for "beit a virus or a popup, I'm the person they call." to be its own sentence. "aswell" is two words.
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Origami RobotOct 27 '11 at 15:00

@KorvinSzanto - welcome. Critique questions on this site must meet our very specific guidelines, including having a set of criteria by which to critique the work. The closest thing to a specific criteria which you have provided is grammar-related, which is not on-topic for critiques. Please edit this question or it will be closed.
–
justktOct 27 '11 at 15:24

1

Korvin, and for some people it's challenging to drive a nail into wood. If you really want that they have a good laugh and throw the resume into the trash, leave FizzBuzz in there. FizzBuzz is not a problem and it's not famous. People who are unable to solve it are infamous, but that's it.
–
John SmithersOct 27 '11 at 17:52

1 Answer
1

By "preamble" do you mean "cover letter"? This is too conversational to go on an actual resume.

"My name is Korvin Szanto" is a complete sentence and it therefore takes a period afterward. (It is also most likely redundant because your name is probably already at the top of your resume or cover letter, and at the bottom of the latter.) There's not too awfully much wrong with the rest of it (although I don't think "subsided" means what you think it means!). I would strike "Given this experience," and "Recently" should be lower-cased.

I think the main problem is the overuse of parentheses, which I call out only because I do the same thing if I'm not careful. "(bitwise)" adds virtually nothing to the sentence; whoever is going to read this does not care too much about how the shortest program is measured in code golf. "(Recently)" would perhaps be better cast as "and, recently, Python". This isn't too bad in a single paragraph but if you use parentheses twice in every paragraph, that will start to get old.

As a sometime programmer I would not even mention FizzBuzz because to actual programmers; it's not actually something to be code-golfed. The whole point of FizzBuzz is that it's such a simple problem that you're not any kind of a programmer if you even have to think about how to solve it (and yet candidates for programming jobs fail it all the time). Code-golfing it is utterly beside the point. I would mention perhaps a classical Computer Science problem like finding prime numbers or Towers of Hanoi, which was in fact posed on codegolf.com.

Also, I would raise an eyebrow to "all standard Web languages." C#? JSP? ColdFusion? XSLT? ALL of them? :-)

Thank you very much! I've amended what you've pointed out within the full preamble (I mean preamble, as I'm not sending a document, I'm sending a textual resume written up for this specific submission.). Please, if you're still willing, take a look at what I have now! PS: Thank you very much for your in-depth analysis, you're exactly what I needed!
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Korvin SzantoOct 27 '11 at 5:24

@KorvinSzanto Even with a customized resume, you usually send a cover letter. What exactly are you sending? A google search reveals a "preamble" in LaTEX for a CV or resume refers to the portion where you detail your contact information, not a written paragraph; that's the only relevant information I'm seeing.
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YamikuronueOct 27 '11 at 20:09